What Would You Do? By John Quinones of ABC

Before this show came out , I've always wondered how people would react not knowing that a hidden camera was watching or anyone else for that matter . There have been similar shows in the past but those were prank and did not deal or address the realities of how the workings of an American mind .

I've come across so many situation living in Nebraska where I wished I had a hidden camera . My next task would be to get John Quinones to go across the US and test out his experiment in different cities to see if the outcomes would be the same ! It will be very interesting to see how people in the South would differ than those in the Mid-West, West Coast or East Coast .

So I've decided to share one my most favorite episode of What Would You Do ? I have many favorites so stay tuned for more videos on "What Would you do?"

In the know, Situation in Nigeria seem pretty complex- The Onion

So some stranger guy I "met" on campus told me about this site The Onion. I was hooked on it for a while and found some of the most hilarious acted out videos on real issues. Check out the next three video below courtesy The Onion.



In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports- Onion News Network

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says- Onion News Network

Split: A Divided America- A Coast to Coast investigation of the divided states of America

The Colbert Report- Monday March 16th

Otedola Joins Dangote on Forbes World’s Richest List- By Ayodele Aminu of This Day Magazine

President/CEO, Dangote Group and Dangote Oil, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has been joined on the Forbes list of world’s richest persons by shipping magnate, Mr. Femi Otedola, who is also the President/CEO of Zenon Petroleum and Gas as well as Chairman/CEO of African Petroleum Plc.

They are the only two Nigerians among the four black people worldwide who made the list. Oprah Winfrey comes first, Aliko Dangote second, Patrick Motsepe third and Femi Otedola fourth.

Winfrey, though the richest black person, is ranked the 234 in the world, while Dangote is ranked 261 with an estimated worth of $2.5 billion and Otedola 601 with $1.2 billion.

The Forbes 2009 Rich List witnesses a dramatic reduction from last year’s 1,125 billionaires to 793, owing to the global economic meltdown which has seen shares around the world plummet to record lows and wiped off N1.4 trillion from their aggregate wealth in one year.

Mircrosoft founder Bill Gates is back as the world's richest as Warren Buffet dropped to second with the stock market collapse. Gates’ fortune has however declined by $18 billion.

While Gates is worth $40 billion, Buffet’s fortune has declined by $25 billion to $37billion.

Last year, Buffet had ended Gates’ 13-year reign at the top as shares in his firm Berkshire Hathaway climbed to a record $150,000 per share.

Some billionaires of 2008 but did not make this year’s list, including former AIG chief executive Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Dangote had, last year, for the first time emerged as the world’s richest black African with a ranking of 334 and a fortune of $3.3 billion.

The value of his fortune may be $2.5 billion this year but he has risen 73 steps on the ladder.

With the meltdown in the stock exchange taking a toll on his quoted companies, Dangote Sugar, Dangote Flour Mills and BCC Cement, the slide in fortunes is not surprising.

Otedola is making the list for the first time. He is the biggest diesel supplier in Nigeria and currently holds the majority stake in AP Plc, and substantial shares in Chevron Texaco and Mobil Oil Service. He is the owner of Seaforce Shipping, FO Properties and FO Transport.

Dangote and Otedola had sometime last year been rated among Nigeria’s six most influential business men by the Financial Times of London. Last year, Otedola donated N1 billion to the ruling Peoples Democratic party (PDP), for the building of the party’s proposed new secretariat.

He and Dangote for long enjoyed a very warm relationship until recently when they fell apart on account of ChevronTexaco. Whether their “membership” of the “exclusive club” of world’s richest will provide an opportunity for reconciliation remains to be seen.

Their ranking is considered a plus for the growing list of Nigerians who have achieved success in their various endeavours: in science, literature and wealth creation.

Otedola told THISDAY he was happy to be alive but his primary concern was how to touch more lives, stating that his goal was to create jobs and alleviate suffering.
Dangote in reaction to his rating last year had predicted that more Nigerians would make the 2009 Forbes list.

The Tottenham lawyer, the £100m Nigerian bribe – and Dick Cheney By Robert Verkaik [The Independent UK]

To his north London clientele, Jeffrey Tesler was just a high-street solicitor with a penchant for wearing brown fedora hats. Few people who passed his shabby-looking offices bothered to take a second look.

But from behind this suburban façade, the 60-year-old lawyer has emerged as a key player in a £100m bribery scandal which spans three continents and implicates an American corporate giant once run by the former vice-president Dick Cheney.

The first Mr Tesler's neighbours knew there was anything more to his business dealings than conveyancing and will-writing was when Scotland Yard detectives and investigators from the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) raided his offices in Tottenham, north London, on Thursday afternoon.

Mr Tesler, a joint British and Israeli passport holder, is being held on strict bail conditions awaiting extradition to America where he is charged with bribing Nigerian government officials to win a lucrative natural gas construction contract for Halliburton, when Mr Cheney was chief executive of the company.

Another British man, Wojciech Chodan, 71, from Maidenhead, has also been charged with bribery offences and is still being sought by the authorities.

At the heart of the allegations are £3.5bn-worth of contracts to build a gas-production plant in Nigeria. Mr Tesler's arrest is the latest development in a 10-year investigation in which US and British anti-fraud officers have been to Lagos, Texas, Geneva and Gibraltar in search of evidence.

How the solicitor became involved in such a massive project is not entirely clear. But since Mr Tesler first passed his law degree in 1970 and then took his articles at the Linklaters & Paines law firm, he became increasingly involved in other enterprises.

After leaving Linklaters in the Seventies he worked for a range of mid-tier solicitors before joining the north London practice, Kaye Tesler.

In 1995 he was hired as an "agent" of a four-company consortium that was awarded four engineering, procurement and construction contracts by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd (NLNG) to build the gas facility on Bonny Island in the Niger Delta.

According to the US indictment, Mr Chodan was a former salesperson and consultant of a UK subsidiary of Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), one of the four joint venture companies. KBR, a major engineering and construction company, was formerly part of Halliburton, which was controlled by Mr Cheney until he became Vice-President in 2000.

The US prosecutors say that at "cultural meetings", Mr Chodan and other co-conspirators allegedly discussed using Mr Tesler and other agents to pay bribes to Nigerian government officials to secure support for awarding the contracts to the joint venture.

It is alleged that the consortium paid Mr Tesler $132m (£94m) with which he was to bribe the Nigerian officials. Through his Gibraltar-based company, Mr Tesler allegedly wired the money to various Nigerian government officials as well as those working for NLNG, the company in charge of the project.

If found guilty, Mr Tesler and Mr Chodan face up to 55 years in a Texan prison. The US government is also seeking forfeiture of $130m from both men.

After his arrest, Mr Tesler was held over night at a London police station before appearing before City of Westminster magistrates where he surrendered his Israeli passport and provided a £500,000 surety.

Questions have also been raised about the use of British taxpayers' money to underwrite part of the £3bn project. The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), the Whitehall agency used to insure British business abroad, agreed to a request by a British consultancy, M W Kellogg, 55 per cent-owned by KBR, to underwrite a bank loan.

The £120m loan made by the French bank BNP Paribas was paid to the Bonny Island project company. MPs claimed the ECGD should have investigated the project more closely before agreeing to secure the loan. An ECGD spokesman said it was not an "investigatory agency" and had only underwritten a small part of the project.

"We will of course ask questions where we need to and when there is something that requires investigation we will alert the appropriate investigatory authority, usually the SFO," said the spokesman.

The SFO said the US charges against Mr Tesler and Mr Chodan had not ended its investigation.





Criminal Investigation of Halliburton's Nigerian Operation - video powered by Metacafe

Russian scholar says US will collapse — next year. By MIKE ECKEL, Associated Press Writer – Wed Mar 4

 MOSCOW – If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.

"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy — a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.

He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" — when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.

Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing and no answers were likely before Wednesday.

It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."
But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko told the AP.

Why Skilled Immigrants Are Leaving the U.S. By Vivek Wadhwa

As the debate over H-1B workers and skilled immigrants intensifies, we are losing sight of one important fact: The U.S. is no longer the only land of opportunity. If we don't want the immigrants who have fueled our innovation and economic growth, they now have options elsewhere. Immigrants are returning home in greater numbers. And new research shows they are returning to enjoy a better quality of life, better career prospects, and the comfort of being close to family and friends.

Earlier research by my team suggested that a crisis was brewing because of a burgeoning immigration backlog. At the end of 2006, more than 1 million skilled professionals (engineers, scientists, doctors, researchers) and their families were in line for a yearly allotment of only 120,000 permanent resident visas. The wait time for some people ran longer than a decade. In the meantime, these workers were trapped in "immigration limbo." If they changed jobs or even took a promotion, they risked being pushed to the back of the permanent residency queue. We predicted that skilled foreign workers would increasingly get fed up and return to countries like India and China where the economies were booming.

Why should we care? Because immigrants are critical to the country's long-term economic health. Despite the fact that they constitute only 12% of the U.S. population, immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley's technology companies and contributed to more than 25% of our global patents. They make up 24% of the U.S. science and engineering workforce holding bachelor's degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. Immigrants have co-founded firms such as Google (NasdaqGS:GOOG - News), Intel (NasdaqGS:INTC - News), eBay (NasdaqGS:EBAY - News), and Yahoo! (NasdaqGS:YHOO - News).

Who Are They? Young and Well-Educated

We tried to find hard data on how many immigrants had returned to India and China. No government authority seems to track these numbers. But human resources directors in India and China told us that what was a trickle of returnees a decade ago had become a flood. Job applications from the U.S. had increased tenfold over the last few years, they said. To get an understanding of how the returnees had fared and why they left the U.S., my team at Duke, along with AnnaLee Saxenian of the University of California at Berkeley and Richard Freeman of Harvard University, conducted a survey. Through professional networking site LinkedIn, we tracked down 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked or received education in the U.S. and had returned to their home countries. This research was funded by the Kauffman Foundation.

Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain," finds that the vast majority of these returnees were relatively young. The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master's degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master's and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups -- precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy and to business and job growth.

Nearly a third of the Chinese returnees and a fifth of the Indians came to the U.S. on student visas. A fifth of the Chinese and nearly half of the Indians entered on temporary work visas (such as the H-1B). The strongest factor that brought them to the U.S. was professional and educational development opportunities.

What They Miss: Family and Friends

They found life in the U.S. had many drawbacks. Returnees cited language barriers, missing their family and friends at home, difficulty with cultural assimilation, and care of parents and children as key issues. About a third of the Indians and a fifth of the Chinese said that visas were a strong factor in their decision to return home, but others left for opportunity and to be close to family and friends. And it wasn't just new immigrants who were returning. In fact, 30% of respondents held permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens.

Eighty-seven percent of Chinese and 79% of Indians said a strong factor in their original decision to return home was the growing demand for their skills in their home countries. Their instincts generally proved right. Significant numbers moved up the organization chart. Among Indians the percentage of respondents holding senior management positions increased from 10% in the U.S. to 44% in India, and among Chinese it increased from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China. Eighty-seven percent of Chinese and 62% of Indians said they had better opportunities for longer-term professional growth in their home countries than in the U.S. Additionally, nearly half were considering launching businesses and said entrepreneurial opportunities were better in their home countries than in the U.S.

Friends and family played an equally strong role for 88% of Indians and 77% of Chinese. Care for aging parents was considered by 89% of Indians and 79% of Chinese to be much better in their home countries. Nearly 80% of Indians and 67% of Chinese said family values were better in their home countries.

More Options Back Home

Immigrants who have arrived at America's shores have always felt lonely and homesick. They had to make big personal sacrifices to provide their children with better opportunities than they had. But they never have had the option to return home. Now they do, and they are leaving.

It isn't all rosy back home. Indians complained of traffic and congestion, lack of infrastructure, excessive bureaucracy, and pollution. Chinese complained of pollution, reverse culture shock, inferior education for children, frustration with government bureaucracy, and the quality of health care. Returnees said they were generally making less money in absolute terms, but they also said they enjoyed a higher quality of life.

We may not need all these workers in the U.S. during the deepening recession. But we will need them to help us recover from it. Right now, they are taking their skills and ideas back to their home countries and are unlikely to return, barring an extraordinary recruitment effort and major changes to immigration policy. That hardly seems likely given the current political climate. The policy focus now seems to be on doing whatever it takes to retain existing American jobs -- even if it comes at the cost of building a workforce for the future of America.